Some might minimize these complaints as the work of the PC police or rabid Tumblr social-justice warriors, but these questions matter. Seeing your lifestyle or identity represented on a television screen is validating, and it's easy to take that validation for granted if you're used to seeing people like you on every channel at every hour. When it doesn't happen, the message is clear: You're not important enough to have your stories told. Your identity—as a racial or ethnic minority, as a queer person, as a woman—isn't important enough to bother with getting it right.

So here's an optimistic prediction for 2014: After a year that saw a lot of rightful objections to the types of characters depicted on television, the coming year could bring some corrective signs of progress.

If ever there were an auspicious sign to kick off a new, yearlong campaign to improve minority visibility on TV, Saturday Night Live would be it. In the past few weeks, its hired a number of black female comedians: Sasheer Zamata joins the cast, while LaKendra Tookes and Leslie Jones are coming to the writers' room.

It was just last October that longtime cast member Kenan Thompson told TV Guide SNL didn't have any new black women on its cast because the show "never find[s] ones that are ready." (The last black female castmember, Maya Rudolph, left the show in 2007.) Thompson was quickly criticized as suggestions rolled in. SNL proved it was paying attention when Scandal's Kerry Washington came to host. The episode’s cold open, which featured Washington running off and on stage scrambling to play the likes of Michelle Obama and Oprah, included this humorous but welcome apology:

The producers at Saturday Night Live would like to apologize to Kerry Washington for the number of black women she will be asked to play. We make these requests because Ms. Washington is an actress of considerable range and talent—and also because SNL does not currently have a black woman on the cast. Mostly the latter. We agree this is not an ideal situation and look forward to rectifying it in the near future, unless, of course, we fall in love with another white guy first.

A few weeks later, SNL held a special audition for a number of black female comedians, and not long after, it announced Upright Citizens Brigade alumna Zamata would be joining the cast in early 2014. Zamata's Internet presence suggests she's a bona fide talent—but the timing and spectacle surrounding the hiring process suggested to some that SNL was more eager to get out of critics' glare than to actually shake things up. Weeks before that audition, comedian Kerry Coddett—who was later invited to try out herself—wrote here at The Atlantic that the real problem with the show wasn't the cast itself, but the roles black women were given by a predominantly white writing staff.

"The Kerry Washington episode, and the show’s long history, suggests that Saturday Night Live just doesn't know what to do with black women," Coddett wrote. "The roles it offers to them fall in line with much of the rest of popular media: stereotypical, demeaning, and scarce.

But SNL seemed to be aware of this, too, when it was later revealed that the show had also hired Tookes and Jones—who also participated in the same audition process as Zamata—to join the writing staff. A few new hires won't undo SNL’s race problem, but their additions suggest SNL is taking some necessary steps to fix where its record falls short.

'Girls' seems to still be trying to learn from its own lessons this year.

NBC isn’t the only network that appears to have actively learned from the past. Looking, HBO's new show about gay men in San Francisco that gets called the “gay Girls” for no other reason than it shares a network with Lena Dunham's project and features young-ish people navigating a city as well as their awkward relationships, premieres next week. When HBO offered a first look at the show in November, writers pounced on its presumed whiteness—even though there were only 40 dialogue-free seconds to go by. In an article for the Huffington Post, Justin Huang wrote:

The most egregious thing about this, the thing that pisses me off the most, the slap in the face is that Looking is supposed to take place in ‘San Francisco.’ If the recent teaser and the main cast properly represent what the show is going to look like, then it definitely isn't the San Francisco that I know and love…

Shame on you, HBO. Did you learn nothing from the Girls race debacle? It's like you're willfully intent on being exclusionary and offensive. Is this a new publicity tactic? I guess it works. How meta of us.

The complaint might have been premature. A few of the main characters are in fact white, but critics who have spent more time with show say it does succeed in portraying the real-life San Francisco Huang is looking to see reflected back. In her preview of the show for Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote:

Looking has clearly learned from the reaction to Girls. The show reflects the Bay Area’s diversity, it’s got sharp class politics, and as Patrick, a video game programmer hoping for a committed relationship, Jonathan Groff has never been more appealing.

Girls, for that matter,seems to still be trying to learn from its own lessons as it moves into its third season. The show's lack of racial diversity was a big talking point surrounding its first and even second seasons, a criticism Lena Dunham said she took to heart when she cast Community's Donald Glover as a second-season love interest. In a nod toward her critics, the guest-star plot ended with a cringe-inducing yet self-aware conversation about race between Dunham’s and Glover’s characters, but it also missed the point in some ways.

Will the success of 'Orange Is the New Black' mean we'll start seeing more leading characters of color on TV?

Judy Berman wrote for The Atlantic that Girls was never going to get over its own race problem as long as Dunham and company cast minority characters in roles that were completely defined by their race. Though Berman notes that white writers simply trying harder to write better characters of color is never going to be enough, Girls hasn’t given up on self-improvement: The Daily Show's Jessica Williams and Orange Is the New Black's Danielle Brooks are guest-starring in the show’s third season, which premiered Sunday, and though only Brooks's character has appeared on the show thus far, the additions feel thoughtful but not disappointingly reactive.

Speaking of Orange Is the New Black, the Netflix original series about a college-educated yuppie's time in prison for decade-old drug crime was one of last year's television breakout stories. (The series returns for a second season in 2014.) Debuting the same year as House of Cards, Netflix’s other big original series, Orange is the New Black was heralded as another sign of the binge-watching, instant-streaming, TV-on-demand revolution. But it also earned praise—perhaps excessive praise—for featuring a cast full of women of color (including transgender actress Laverne Cox) who played characters with a range of sexualities. Creator Jenji Kohan, who previously helmed the drug-dealing dark comedy Weeds, has often talked about the show's central character, Piper Chapman (Taylor schilling) as the necessary white ingredient in creating a show about the types of characters not often seen on TV. As Kohan told NPR:

In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it's a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it's relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It's useful.

Will Orange’s success mean we'll start seeing more leading characters of color on TV? It's not out of the question, considering how sometimes a successful underdog franchise is all it takes to convince executives that smart and funny stories about minority characters or women deserve extra consideration. Take Bridesmaids, for example: One of the more fascinating tidbits from New York magazine's 2012 profile of Mindy Kaling was how much Bridesmaids played a role in getting Kaling’s show The Mindy Project a spot in the primetime lineup. As Jada Yuan writes:

When I asked Reilly why he’d given Mindy the network’s best prime-time slot for a new comedy, after last year’s breakout New Girl, he invoked the B-word. Yes, Bridesmaids (and the C-word: “crossover” potential), explaining that he thought their dynamic hour could re-create the magic of Kristen Wiig’s movie by appealing to both sexes.

There are differences in how Bridesmaids and Orange could affect the TV market, of course: Bridesmaids was a major motion picture that grossed more than $288 million and had names like Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph attached. Orange Is the New Black was a relative guinea pig in Netflix's original-content experiment. (If you're willing to speculate, there is a show that seem like it could be spiritual successor: In December, Parks and Recreation star Rashida Jones sold HBO a dark comedy called Claws about a nail salon; the majority of American nail-salon employees are women of color.)

Considering the accolades Orange has received (and its healthyviewership numbers), perhaps 2014 will be the year we see a similar Bridesmaids-esque ripple effect. If 2014 is going to be a good year for television checking its prejudices, let’s hope more shows like it will get the green light.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.